CREATIVITY

Beliefs - stimulating or inhibiting creativity

The directions can be very different - just for what you believe

Robert W. Dilts: There's an interesting story about Michael Faraday, the discoverer of electromagnetic induction. He discovered that if you had two coils and you passed an electric current through one of the coils, you'd get a current in the adjacent one. He did that in the early 1800's and it was very difficult for him to prove that he was actually getting a current in the second coil. He did an awful lot of work to come to that conclusion. He published a paper and a woman wrote him a letter and said, "Dr. Faraday, that is a wonderful invention. Isn't it possible that you could use this principal to transmit information through space?" And he wrote a letter back saying in no uncertain terms that it was foolish to think that something like this would ever have any use except as a laboratory curiosity. Faraday was a very creative person - and the person who wrote the letter to him was even more creative.

Robert B. Dilts: Beliefs determine whether something will be perceived as feedback or as failure. One of my favorite stories is about the two shoe salespeople who get sent to Mexico. Let's say one is Faraday and one is the woman who wrote him the letter. They are both sent to Mexico to sell shoes. After a month Faraday writes back to the home office and says, "Nobody down here wears shoes. They wear sandals. I'm coming home. No market." And she writes back and says, "Hey, send all the shoes you can get down here. No one has any. We can sell them to everybody!" Is the glass half empty or half full? It  depends on the meta program and evidence you are using.

 Robert W. Dilts: That is like the person who invented the automobile. People said, "Well it's a nice curiosity, but it will never replace the horse. First of all, if everyone were really going to have one of these things, you'd have to have tons of this 'gas', and then you'd have to have these gas stations all over the place because it only goes a limited distance on a tank of gas. And then you'd have to have miles and miles of paved roads, so these things could drive on them. That will never happen. The horse can go on almost any kind of surface and eats grass which you can find everywhere. It's a much more efficient form of transportation. Forget the automobile."

Robert B. Dilts, Todd Epstein and Robert W. Dilts

In Tools for Dreamers – Strategies for Creativity and the Structure of Innovation (Meta Publications)

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